Another name change at the Keynote? There was no mention of ARM at the keynote. Instead it was all about
Apple Silicon and SOC (System On a Chip).
I was intrigued by the possible implications of an SOC. Graphics processing was specifically mentioned along with the neural engine as part of the package but what else might be on the same silicon. Twenty-five or more years ago there was a lot of discussion about having the
memory on the chip and even the remote possibility of
storage on the chip as well. The objective as always being cheaper, faster, and using less power. Of course hardware upgrades and/or third party add ons would be out of the question. Conceptually intriguing but the technology simply was not available to make it happen at that time. But that was 25 years ago. When Apple started talking about an SOC I began to envision a Mac mini little bigger than today's iPhone Pro Max because of the real estate needed to accommodate multiple Thunderbolt 3/USB C ports and performance on a par with today's 10 core iMac Pro. Add a battery, keyboard and monitor and you would have the MacBook Pro. Bolt it into a slot on a 21" to 27" monitor and you would have an iMac Pro, lose the external device ports, change the energy management firmware add a battery and cellular modem and it is an iPhone, give that version a larger screen and it becomes an iPad.
Okay, I grant the conversion from device to device is greatly over-simplified, but it could be done. As they said during the Keynote, the iMac Pro used for the presentations was running the same A12x processor that is used in the current iPad Pro. (...and it sure seemed fast and smooth!)
